Baudrillard: Short Introduction (Mann)

[I am analyzing a five-page typo-riddled summary of a sixty-year span of work, so I am uncertain whether the vigorous disagreements I have with Baudrillard are actually with Mann, or with Baudrillard’s work itself.]

Added “sign exchange value” to Marx’s “use value” and “exchange value”
– signs of social distinctions

Vietnam War: we won through our own camera reality of victory-aimed cinema

 

My dear Baudrilliard, I do think you are entirely alone in this interpretation, at least about Vietnam, but perhaps you wrote this in the middle of the war, or were only reading the National Review?

The Gulf War didn’t take place because Americans experienced it solely through hypperreal images on tv.

“We” (this summary uses “we” instead of “Americans”) actually experienced the Gulf War as people who flew across, shipped across, and fought, and traveled, and died, and got hurt, and were okay and killed. And not “we,” but yes, “we” were also the 20,000+ Iraqis who died. Right, I get that there is a sense of the “hyperreal,” but this ain’t new my friend. For as long as there have been humans using language or drawn symbols to communicate, we have been living in the hyperreal. All stories are “hypperreal.” The advent of television did not bring those stories and that sepration of experience; instead it provided a different forum for those stories, and for different types of stories.

I appreciate later that Mann points out Baudrillard’s interpretations of misogyny, er, “love.” It always helps to have a sense of a person’s perspective on the ladies when examining their worldview. The gentleman was born in 1927 France, so his fixation on the binary of the sexes and women as “seductive, artificial, symbolic, manipulative of signs” (Mann, p 2) against the male direction and “rational” phallus enlightens us to his ignorance that perhaps he misread his own “map of reality.”

Orders of Simulcra

.. Because yes, we do trade in maps of reality. We always have. One essence of our human identity is our cognition with which we may interpret experience. We derive meaning from experience, and Baudrillard’s suggestion that this means that we live among simulcra I can stand behind, but his ethnocentric “Orders of Simulcra” is pathetically narrow at best and insidiously culturally harmful at worst. His orders also further exclude that living in a “desert of the real” is the nature of being human.

Interactive Dramaturges Ch. 3 (Krieg)

Machines are on logic domain: not “dialoguing”
Dialogue etymology: “two” + “knowledge” / collegial reasoning
— probably enabled the development of self-consciousness and human identity

Computers: underlying architecture is logically closed
Search engines provide the “where” but not the actual answer
Knowledge system: : analyze all represented data and synthesize new knowledge
– ability to create new hypotheses
– complex, not complicated
– thinking is always analytical and intuitve
— (ahem, Western culture) has a history of privileging a hierarchy of “rational”/logical/analytical over intuitive, synthetic thinking considered irrational

> Let’s note that these two separate categories of attributes have been applied to sex: male to the former, female to the latter

Computers work with “if-then” hierarchy, which demands a beginning and an end
– mono-logic.
– humans are polylogic

“Autopoiesis” (coined by Humberto Maturana): humans can simulate through language

Virtual Reality games give the illusion of dialogue, but not dialogue itself

Krieg’s Interactive Cinema System for Electronic Video Interactive System:
– option to select “footnote” sequence via personal controller through majority voting
– no dialogue

Future aim: polylogic architecture + virtual data => cognitive computing + true human-machine dialogue
– Future computers would be able to “invite Shakespeare to dinner”

 

Krieg fails to note in his description of how a future polylogic computer could dialogue about Shakespeare that there would remain, like humans, multiple answers to the questions put to Computer Shakespeare, just as English scholars would respond with conflicting interpretations. This vision of a polylogic computer who can work in meaning and infinite interpretations is far from us, as until humanity determines a “right” answer, a computer will also be unable to provide much more than further fodder into the murky philosophy of life.

Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty (Gaver, Brucher, Pennington, Walker)

Designing for pleasure is different approach than designing for utility
Designing for utility is different approach
Pleasure is best with empathy, passion, humor

> This is a strangely narrow interpretation of pleasure: pleasure can be through rigor, surprise, change, familiarity, difference, etc..

> I suggest that utility and pleasure are interchangeable: something is not easily used if it causes displeasure. (We’re going to except here the circumstances where frustration is the goal of a “product.”) The well-balanced hammer is designed for utility and, one could argue, for pleasure. The sense of the dropped weight in each end of the product gives rise to to a more optimal–read: easier–use.

Cultural probes: design-led approach to understanding users through empathy and engagement
– knowledge has limits
– values uncertainty, play, exploration, subjective interpretation

Towards knowing your audience…

Designing for friends: “we know them well, but that doesn’t mean we know exactly what we should make for them” (6).

> Important to recall that when we “know” the “audience,” there are still possibilities of their having interpretations (or actions) that we could not have predicted.

Probes: “collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time.

Probology: uses probes to encourage sujective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as possible values for design.

> I like this phrase: pervasive sense of uncertainty. I would not aim for this, at least not in my following work, but returning to Forlizzi and Battarbee, this would fit into choices over what elements I provide that are fluent experiences, and which would present uncertainty through a cognitive experience. How much do I want my audience working mid-experience to figure it out.

Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems (Forlizzi, Battarbee)

Themes: what is experience, especially in design
Design, human factors, interaction design

Ethnographic methods to mediate experience with specialized people & specialty roles of designers

Design research: interactions between people and products + the experience that results

“User experience” has many definitions:
– Product-centered
– User-centered
– Interaction-centered

User-product interactions: 3 ways to describe:
1. Fluent: automatic, e.g. coffee-making machine, bike/riding
2. Cognitive: requires focus on the product at hand, e.g. learning/using “foreign” toilets
3. Expressive: help user form a relationship with the produce, e.g. restoring old furniture, customizing car, appearance

> As I build interactive theater-works that appear through marketing media to present a contract of sit-down-in-the-dark-and-watch-listen, I’m interested in examining what “fluency” to retain when I subvert that expectation and “ask” (through a few methods of communication) my audience to move in the space, acknowledge each other, experiment with their own bodies and social interactions–what Forlizzi and Battarbee would call a “co-experience” with expressive and cognitive interactions. What methods would empower the audience to form their own relationship with the virtual and present media and fellow theater citizens?

“Co-experience”: in social contexts
– Experience in which users interpretations are influences by the physical or virtual presence of others.
– Provide new channels for social interaction

>This, above, is my intention for my approaching 2016 MFA project: to design an interactive experience in which I’ve delineated the fluent, cognitive, and expressive elements in the process towards redefining the theater social interaction with a focus on spoking ideas rising from empathy research.